In a different project at the Georgia Tech Research Institute, we were tasked with the quest of finding an extremely interactive way of training people. Naturally, we chose Unity3d as our engine. The original demo used the Xbox Kinect to track the upper body and two Wiimotes to track hand rotation. While the demo functioned, it wasn’t quite the seamless experience we were hoping for.

As if deemed by fate, the Razer Hydra had recently been released, and not only that, some community members figured out how to interface with the dll. Yay for plugins. While we preferred a wireless solution, the Hydra was so incredibly accurate, supporting 6DOF (degrees of freedom) out of the box, that it was just impossible not to fall in love with. Oh, and it was at a reasonable price too. We did play around a bit with TrackIR and facial tracking to allow the user’s head to control the camera, but in the end opted for the traditional joystick approach.